


breath in a graveyard

by soundthebells (kosy)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Study, F/M, Ghosts, Multi, Spoilers From Season One On, Tape Recorder Sasha (Adjacent), canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:21:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24595216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kosy/pseuds/soundthebells
Summary: It occurs to Sasha that she is dead. The revelation is matter-of-fact and changes very little.
Relationships: Sasha James & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Sasha James & Tim Stoker, Sasha James/Tim Stoker
Comments: 48
Kudos: 193





	breath in a graveyard

**Author's Note:**

> hello! quick disclaimer: this isn't based on @equalseleventhirds on tumblr's tape recorder sasha theory, but i've read it and i'm sure it influenced me while writing this. as far as content warnings go, this focuses hard on the themes of being forgotten/replaced and death that canon brings up, so be careful of that.
> 
> recommended listening: "Big Houses" by Squalloscope.
> 
> thanks for reading!

i. Every old building has its ghosts. 

The Magnus Institute isn’t any different, but it’s a funny thing, really—there aren’t any stories about whatever spectres might walk its centuries-old halls. It’s something of an inside joke for the employees, that this place built to hear and research and catalog ghost stories has none of its own. 

Then again, who knows. Maybe Sasha is the first. 

She’d liked ghosts. There was a clean poeticism to them, a tragedy of remaining. Trying to keep living in a world that isn’t for you anymore and maybe never was to begin with. Sasha didn’t think of them as scary. 

She hadn’t believed in them either, though, which was probably a factor. They were memories more than anything else, she thought. Something projected onto nothing. The living grasping desperately for any connection with the dead, or at least the comfort of an after. 

But there’s nothing. There’s—she saw what came after and there was _nothing._ Looking back, it was probably the act of trying to see the nothing that did it. 

Sasha opens her eyes. 

She’s in Artifact Storage. Standing. Behind her is the table with the web design. Her ears are ringing. 

The world is hazy around her but she can see perfectly, and within minutes the ringing in her ears resolves itself into the wail of a fire alarm. The idea of moving never even occurs to her. 

Somebody walks out of Artifact Storage and closes the door. Sasha does not know them.

The alarm goes on for a long time. Then it stops. 

She stands there, not swaying, not trembling. She stares straight ahead into the dark room. She’d dropped the tape recorder when the _thing_ lunged at her but it wasn’t there anymore. It must have taken it. She opens her mouth to speak, maybe to call for help or maybe just to prove to herself that she’s still here, but sound doesn’t come out. It occurs to her that she is dead. The revelation is matter-of-fact and changes very little. 

ii. Sasha isn’t sure how long she stands in the same place, unmoving. It’s against her nature, but she doesn’t know what the hell her nature is anyway now that she’s dead. So it doesn’t seem to matter much. Eventually, though, people come back. Sonya and Jack and Allen and a few new faces who probably won’t last too long. They rarely do in Artifact Storage. They mill around her, and she steps out of the way to be courteous but it doesn’t make a difference; they pass through like she’s not there at all. 

Movement comes back to her slowly. Her lungs still do what they’ve always done, expanding and contracting, but the action is ineffectual. The air remains unmoved. She might even still have blood, but her fingernails slip through her arms like water when she tries to check. But, painfully slowly, she manages to stagger out of Artifact Storage. It takes hours. 

Why hadn’t anybody come looking for her? 

There was no body on the floor, but surely somebody must have noticed her missing. Surely _somebody,_ surely Martin or Jon or Tim— 

God, maybe they’re dead too. Sasha manages to stumble along a bit more quickly. 

The Institute is dark. Everybody went home for the night, she supposes. After all, she’d lost track of time. The Archives are, of course, empty. 

Already, walking inside, she feels more herself again. Or, well. The term is relative, seeing as she’s a ghost and all. For some reason the concept doesn’t feel unnatural or surprising. 

She’d always thought of the Archives as a dead area. Rooms kept cold to preserve the documents, an open-plan office space with too many empty walls and floors. Shelves upon shelves of the words of people long-dead or headed that way, all crammed into cassette tapes or manila folders or boxes. A graveyard of sorts filled with thousands of tiny tombs. A fitting enough place to haunt. 

Now, though, it seems to almost hum around her, vital and present. Her breath feels more like breath. 

_Watch,_ something inside her whispers. _Listen._

The voice is her own. Her choice has already been made. 

iii. The Archives stay empty for a while. On leave, she assumes. People in hazmat suits clear out the last of the worm corpses. Maintenance comes by and patches up the holes in the walls where the worms broke through. The cops—one small and mean-looking, one large and stern-faced—sweep the area but don’t seem to be trying that hard. They come out of Jon’s office with stacks of tapes in their arms. Tunnels, apparently, below the Institute the whole time. Who’d’ve thought?

She spends her time trying to figure out what she can do as a ghost. Very little, as it turns out. Pass through walls because she can’t touch anything. Pass through people because she can’t touch anything. Pass through books when she tries to turn the pages to read them because she _can’t touch anything._ The boredom alone is enough to make her scream, but of course nothing comes out, of course it doesn’t. 

iv. Sasha doesn’t recognize the first person who properly comes back to work. It takes her a moment to realize this must be her replacement. Was it that easy for them to find someone new? It’s a woman. Average height. Pale blue eyes, chin-length brown hair with a bit of a wave to it at the ends. Makeup, just enough to be noticeable. 

She almost expects the woman to notice her, but she is as unblinking as the hazmats and the maintenance guys and the cops had been when Sasha passes through the door of Jon’s office to get a better look at her. 

The woman glances around the room with furrowed brows, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, smiles at one of the blank walls—just a sharp little tug of the lips, secretive, like she’s in on a joke—and sits down at Sasha’s desk. Or what used to be Sasha’s desk, she supposes. 

It shouldn’t hurt as much as it does. 

v. They don’t give the new woman any time to train. Which is a weird oversight even for the Institute, whose HR and Admin departments are haphazard at best. There’s not even somebody there to help her along as she acclimates to the job. So she just _sits_ there in the Archives in front of a computer she can’t log into without it crashing for some reason. She calls IT and they fix it and then she stares at the login screen until the monitor goes back to sleep and then she keeps staring. The new woman doesn’t do anything. Doesn’t go on her phone, if she even has one. Doesn’t doodle on any of the spare pieces of paper. Just stares at the black screen. Didn’t anybody tell her the password? 

vi. Martin comes back finally. He looks tired, his smile shakier than usual and still hoisted up bravely like some tattered flag. But he comes in to work three minutes early just like he always did, and she relaxes, sort of. 

He doesn't see Sasha either. Whatever stubborn hope she might’ve had left finally crumbles away, and it might have been a relief. 

This is her existence, now. She watches Martin sigh and sit down at the desk opposite the new woman. 

“Hi, Sasha,” he says, hushed, and she jumps; would’ve knocked over one of the books on the desk by accident if she’d had arms to do it with.

“Hi, Martin,” the new woman replies, half-smiling. “Good to be back?” Sasha stares at her, then at Martin, then back at her, uncomprehending.

He scratches at the back of his neck. “I guess. Better than sitting at my flat all day, thinking about… y’know.” 

“Yes.” 

“...you? Th-that is, are you glad to be back too?” 

She smiles again. “Yes.” 

It is then that Sasha notices the new woman is wearing her cardigan. 

vi. It’s the same routine with Jon. He comes back earlier than his mandated sick leave actually permits and ignores Martin’s protests. He smiles distractedly at the woman who is not her—”Oh, uh, yes, good to see you too, of course, I’ll just be in my office,”—and calls her by Sasha’s name. How long had she been afraid of being forgotten? How long had she been afraid of her own futility? She wants to scream. But all she can do is _watch._

The word feels heavier than it used to. 

vii. Tim comes back on a Monday. He’s got new scars; small, scabbed hole-punches that dot over his cheeks and throat and arms, matching Jon’s. He shows up late but, as ever, fashionably so.

She had paced the lobby of the Institute for hours before his return. It’s not like she needs to sleep anymore. Rosie had come in and breezed right through her, then shivered. But the Institute was always cold. 

Ten minutes later, he shoulders his way through the double doors; he’s got four coffees all clutched to his chest. Rosie laughs from the reception desk and he shoots a grin back at her, raising one of the to-go cups at her in salute. 

“Welcome back, Tim!” 

“Good to be back!” he calls over his shoulder, already loping toward the stairs down to the basement. He takes the steep steps three at a time while balancing all four coffees, the maniac, and she has to run to keep up with him—this has to be the fastest she’s had reason to move in weeks—and for a moment she can convince herself this is normal, this is whole, this is her racing after Tim because that’s what she’s always done, and then he skids to a stop at the entrance to the Archives. 

Because the new woman, the woman who Sasha will not call Sasha, is standing in the doorway. 

“Sash!” he grins, bright and easy, gesturing for her to take one of the to-go cups. “I missed you! ’S been ages!” _Sash._ She misses the nickname. Misses pretending to be annoyed at it. Misses how Tim would smile at her because he knew when she was only pretending. He could always call her bluffs. 

The new woman takes one of the cups. “It has.”

Tim cocks his head. “Are you okay?” 

“I’m fine. Is something the matter?” She blinks up at him, guileless and flat. 

“No, ‘course not.” Different grin this time, the one Sasha knows is fake. “Just—you never replied to my messages.” 

“Oh. Yes, I lost my phone when Prentiss attacked. I had to get a new number and didn’t remember yours.” Sasha remembered his number. Of course she did. He was her fucking emergency contact; the only person in London she was really close to anymore. She memorized it so she could call him from a payphone or from a stranger’s phone if hers ever died. She memorized it because it mattered. Matters. 

“Right,” Tim says. “Well. Can I have your new one?” 

“Yeah, sure,” she says, then turns on her heel and walks back into the Archives. Tim waits a beat, brow furrowed, before following. Sasha does the same. 

viii. Some evenings, she wanders the halls of the Institute. Isn’t sure what for. It just feels like the thing to do. She goes to the canteen, sits at the table where she and Jon and Tim and Martin would eat lunch sometimes. She stands by the reception desk and looks over the papers Rosie has left out. She walks among the stacks of the library, an eternity of books she’ll never get to read. 

She goes to Elias’ office. For the hell of it, mostly. Sasha holds no fondness for him, but all of the Institute feels somehow _hers,_ and she intends to map its every corner. 

He’s still there. 

There’s light spilling out from the crack under the door, if nothing else, and on instinct she goes to gently push it open, but her hands go right through to the other side. She pulls them back. She can still see them, that’s the thing. They don’t even look ghostly. They’re the same freckled brown they’ve always been, the same picked-at nails and pale scar on her index finger where she’d accidentally stabbed herself while sewing when she was twelve. It’s disorienting to remember that you’re not actually alive. 

There’s a long, belabored sigh from behind the heavy wooden door. “Come in, Sasha. I was hoping to delay this meeting further, but I suppose some questions must be answered sooner than later, especially in your case.”

She steps into the room, aching to speak. _You can see me? Can you hear me too?_

Elias is the first person to look her in the eye for three months. His gaze is impassive and flat. She almost weeps anyway. 

“Yes, I can see you. And, I suppose, hear you too. In a way.” He takes off his reading glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose. “I had wanted to do this differently, but needs must.” Elias reaches into one of the drawers of his desk, pulls out a tape recorder, and lays it on the surface, lining it up with a corner. He hits the record button. 

All at once, Sasha can hear her breath. It’s deafening and awful and rasps, and she can’t hear it in her own ears. It plays from the tape recorder, grainy with background static. 

“W—What?” 

Her voice crackles back over the tape recorder, whiny with feedback but still her, definitely _her,_ and she can’t breathe. 

Elias leans back in his chair, fingers steepling. “I had suspected as much.” 

“Suspected _what?”_

He casts her a vaguely amused look. “That this was the case. You've died and now you’re a ghost, Sasha.” 

“Clocked that, did you? How astute.” 

“More than a ghost,” he amends, eyes alight with an oilslick sheen she’d never quite noticed before. “There’s no such thing as a ghost. You are with the Eye.” 

“The _Eye?_ I don’t know what y—Elias, that—the thing, the woman, it stole my body—” 

“Not your body,” Elias corrects. “Your body is gone for good. Where, I don’t know. But it didn’t steal your body, Sasha. No. It stole _you.”_

“What the _hell_ does that mean?”

“It stole you. The Eye, I assume, was unwilling to lose such a promising acolyte so soon, so it took back what it could.” A dry laugh. “It wasn’t much. Regardless, you have your own role to play now. I’ll have to adjust accordingly, of course. I doubt much will change.” 

“What role?” 

He stares her down and arches a greying eyebrow. “Well, the Archivist’s role is to see and know.” He enunciates slowly, as if explaining the concept to a very young child. “To categorize information and experience it firsthand. An ideal Archivist doesn’t change the greater course with their actions, but their experience is still their own. They still affect the world, even as they comprehend none of it. Does that make sense? You, I think, are a step further removed. You surveil. Hear. Listen. Perhaps you even understand. But you are a true servant of the Ceaseless Watcher in the way an Archivist could never be: you _can’t_ act. You aren’t a tape recorder, at least not in any literal sense. But you’ve got about as much autonomy.” 

Before she can say anything more, he hits the stop button. She feels the silence like a loss.

He smiles and he says, “Do you see?” 

She does. 

ix. Sasha wishes she could slam doors or push books off shelves or knock cups of tea over. She wishes she could turn the air cold or make lights flicker. She wishes she could make all the windows open up. 

x. Sasha wishes she could fall asleep. She wishes she could hear her heart beat and feel blood in her veins. She wishes she could speak. She wishes she could be seen. 

xi. Sasha wishes somebody would turn on a fucking tape recorder every once in a while. For some reason, she can’t get at the one Jon uses to record his statements on. As far as she can tell they need to be recording dead air. His statement cassettes have a purpose. She doesn’t. 

xii. Some of the recorders have started turning on seemingly of their own accord. Never when she needs them. Never when the Not-Her is joking with Tim and Martin. Never when Jon is on the verge of a panic attack at his desk, knees tucked up to his chest. Never when Tim is staring mutinously at the door to the Head Archivist office. Never when Martin is holding back tears as he makes tea for three people who will leave it untouched. 

Mostly just at night. She doesn’t think that she controls them. She hopes she doesn’t control them. That would mean that she’s just choosing not to speak. 

She can’t trust her choices these days. 

xiii. A couple of the interns have started talking about the tape recorders. They keep popping up in places they shouldn’t. Sometimes, if you stay late enough, they begin to sing. 

xiv. Sasha’s voice is just above average enough that she felt good about doing karaoke back when she was alive. She used to go for the singer-songwriter stuff, the kind of thing that shows off both your range and your semi-obscure taste in music. She got into the habit of singing to herself, living alone in her flat. The silence grated on her, so she became used to filling it on her own. Still is. These days, though, it’s mostly 80s Britpop. Lighthearted stuff that reminds her of driving with the windows down, speeding far away from London.

The interns neglect to mention this.

xv. Tim looks calm when he walks into the document storage room. It’s where she’s been hiding out lately when watching becomes too much. Her new haunt. 

There’s a tape recorder in the room, still playing out its dead air. The sound of her breathing is so soft even she can barely hear it in the silence. 

Tim looks calm. Dangerously so. Something has to be wrong.

Sasha shoots to her feet, starts to grab for his arm. Stops. 

His head jerks around at the sound of movement. “Who’s there?” 

“It’s—it’s just me.” 

_“Who?”_ His gaze snaps wildly around the room and finally finds the tape recorder lying on the abandoned, neatly-made bed. “Oh.” His voice is bitterly amused. “Of course. What else would it be, right?” He strides toward it purposefully, already reaching out—

“Tim, don’t!” 

The words crackle out desperately over the recorder and he snatches his hand back. “What the fuck? How do y—?”

She takes a step towards him, hovers a hand above his arm though she knows whether or not she touches him makes no real difference. She tries to make her voice soft even through the unforgiving, hissing whir of the cassette. 

“Please.” 

“What are you? Some kind of—of tape recorder ghost?” He barks out a laugh, too-loud and abrasive.

“Ha. No. Just a person.” 

“Rrrright.” 

_“Tim.”_

She waits for an exasperated echo of her name she knows won’t come. It still hurts when it doesn’t. 

Tim blinks down at the tape recorder. “How do you know my name?” 

“I just do. That’s—that’s going to have to be enough for the moment.” 

He snorts in a way that she knows means he’s just accepted all this now. “Sure. Why not.” Always so quick to adapt. It’d almost be comforting if it weren't for the clench of his fists, unrelaxed before he even came into the room. 

“What happened?” 

“What _didn’t?”_

“You’re going to have to be more specific than that.” 

“No.” 

“...Okay. That’s—that’s fine. You don't have to tell me.” 

Tim sits down on the bed and picks up the tape recorder, turning it over in his hands. She sits down next to him. He pauses a long while before speaking again. 

“We tried to talk to Jon. About—” He waves a hand in the air. “I don’t know what we were expecting. I doubt it helped, though. None of us are handling it well, but he just—” 

“I know.” 

He laughs bitterly. “Do you?” 

“I mean, I’m here, aren’t I? I listen.” 

“Fair enough.” 

Jon’s looking for ghosts in all the wrong places. 

They sit in silence for a while until Tim finally exhales and pushes himself up to his feet. 

“I should go,” he says, then tries for a smile. “Nice meeting you.” 

The whirring of the tape shuts off. Tim waits for a response for a few moments, sighs, and leaves.

xvi. Time passes. Sometimes Tim still comes to sit in the dark document storage room. Sometimes a recorder is there. Sometimes one isn’t. Sasha can’t move them and she doesn’t know where they come from. Sometimes Sasha isn’t there either and she sees him leaving, and the fact that she missed another of her chances with him tears at her. 

“Who were you?” Tim asks quietly. They hadn’t said anything to each other. Things have been harder recently. Jon’s angrier but really just more afraid, and his paranoia settles heavy over the Archives like smoke.

“Tim—” 

“I mean, you can’t have always been like this.” He’s staring down at the tape recorder in his hands, running a thumb along the buttons. “It’s not like it’s a thing that just—happens.” 

_“No,_ I wasn’t born a tape recorder. I’m still not a tape recorder. This is just—how I speak.” 

“And you really can’t tell me any more than that?’ 

“No. I’m sorry, Tim.” 

“You can’t tell me or you won’t?” 

“I _can’t._ The static, that’s—it isn’t me. I wouldn’t. I want to tell you more, but I don’t think _it_ would let m—” 

He elects to ignore the _it._ “Not even your name?” 

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” 

“Try me.” 

She opens her mouth and tells him. Static.

A pause, then: “Bet they mess up your name at Starbucks all the time, huh?” 

Sasha laughs in spite of herself.

“Yeah, they always spell it wrong on the cup. Assholes.” 

“Seriously, though, what can I call you?” The edge of desperation tingeing his voice tugs at her, and she wishes she could put her arm around him.

“I don’t know.” 

“I have to have _something._ I can’t just keep calling you Tape Recorder Ghost.” 

“...Alexandria works. Given that I’m haunting a glorified library and all.” 

“Nerd. But sure, yeah. Alexandria. I can do that.” 

“Glad to hear I’ve got your seal of approval.” 

xvii. She tries to keep talking to him. But the more they do, the more they run into the static. 

“How are you still here? I mean, I didn’t even think ghosts _existed—”_

Sasha chooses her words carefully.

“Something is... keeping me here. I’m not a ghost. Not in the conventional sense.” 

She breathes a sigh of relief when it doesn’t static out over the recorder, but Tim still looks unsatisfied, pacing back and forth restlessly.

He snorts. “Well, you’re certainly not a person.” 

The tape keeps whirring quietly. 

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” 

“You aren’t wrong.” 

“That doesn’t mean it was—” 

“It’s _fine.”_

“Okay.” A pause. “Is there anything more you can tell me?” 

“Sure. You’re trapped by something called the Eye, or the Beholding, or the Watcher, or something, and I don’t fully know what it means yet but that’s why you can’t quit your job. Jon is paranoid because he’s trapped in a web he doesn’t understand and probably never will until it’s too late. And the woman you think is Sasha is a—a goddamned _monster_ who stole my life and she’s been playing you this whole time, and you’re hurting because your friendship is falling apart but never existed in the first place because it’s supposed to be me. It’s supposed to be _me.”_

She can feel herself shaking. Tim has his hands clapped over his ears, face twisted up into a grimace. 

“Okay, I didn’t hear anything after ‘sure’.” 

“Sorry.” 

xviii. Sasha wishes she could touch people. 

xix. “I feel like you’re somebody I’m supposed to know. Like, we haven’t met before so I don’t, but I should. Does that—does that make sense?” 

“Yeah. It does.” 

xx. “Do you ever get lonely?” 

“I’m a ghost, Tim. I think getting lonely is just part of the deal.”

xxi. “Have you told anybody I’m here yet?” 

“No. They’d probably think I’m a lunatic, sitting here in an empty room talking to nothing. I mean, what if I’m the only one who can hear you?” 

“I guess it’s for the best then.” 

“I— _Someday_ I will. Promise.” 

“You don’t have to lie to make me feel better.” 

xxii. She watches. It all feels so circular. The details of each day are different, yes—the outfits, the conversations, the frustrations—but the pattern only ever repeats. Variations on the same melody. 

Sasha reminds herself to keep caring. To watch over instead of just watch. She sits vigil with Jon as he drags himself through another all-nighter, cups of tea going cold at his side. She perches on the counter in the breakroom as Martin heats up his lunch in the microwave, takeout from the Thai place near his flat. She walks by Tim’s side as he wanders through the library looking for yet another book on nineteenth-century architecture, unconsciously following the path she’s traveled hundreds of times before. And she stares at what is not her, sitting at her computer and doing her research and sipping tea from her mug. 

There’s the sense of something coming to a head. 

xxiii. “I feel like Sasha’s been... off, lately.” 

“...” 

“What do you think? I mean, you’ve been watching for a while—” 

“No.” 

“Alexandria—?”

“Don’t call me that.” 

“But you said—” 

“That’s not my name.” 

“Tell me what it really is, then.” 

“I _can’t.”_

xxiv. Melanie King comes to the Archives and asks where Sasha is. Says the woman sitting at her desk and answering her emails is not the woman she met before. 

Sasha thought she did away with hope months ago.

xxv. “We’re friends, right?” 

“I—Tim, of course we’re friends.” 

xxvi. When the table is broken, she knows it somehow. It tugs like a fishhook somewhere behind her stomach, and she almost keels over. It’s weird, feeling pain that's nearly physical after so many months of none of it. 

She can hear the thing that has never been her calling out dissonantly for Jon. But she can’t follow them into the tunnels. That would not be her domain. 

xxvii. Sasha watches Elias kill Jurgen Leitner and isn’t even surprised. It’s a brutal affair, and she doesn’t look away. He can see her there. Makes eye contact with her once before turning back to the mess of shattered bone and pulpy flesh that used to be a man. 

She knows what he is. She would’ve told Tim by now, but anything to do with Elias is blocked off by the static almost entirely. It makes sense, she supposes. She exists and speaks on the good grace of the Eye. Only fair that the patron of terrible knowledge would control who receives it and how. 

xxviii. Tim stops coming to visit, and she doesn’t push it, even when the tape recorders start turning on of their own volition with greater frequency and he glares down at them, fists clenching. They aren’t her, not entirely. Not yet. Hopefully never. But she wouldn’t blame him even if they were, all things considered. She’d hate being surveilled too if she didn’t so badly miss being seen. 

xxix. The tape recorders don’t sing anymore.

xxx. Whirring like breath in an empty room. She speaks aloud as a reminder to herself more than anything else.

“I guess I just thought I had more time.” 

It’s funny. It doesn’t matter how long you spend thinking about death and dying when you’re alive. You never really think it’ll happen to you. You think you have all the time in the world to dance around your feelings and make mistakes and try again and again and again to get it right. You never know when your last chance is. A ghost is an endless fight against being too late, and the war has already been lost. 

xxxi. Martin: “And Sasha? Did you kill her too?” 

Jon: “Sasha died almost a year ago, Martin.” 

Martin: “W-what?” 

Tim: “Oh, God.” 

xxxii. She waits for him down in the document storage room, sitting on the bed. He races into the room, slamming the door open so hard it bangs into the wall, and Sasha startles even though she’d been expecting it. 

Tim punches the record button so hard he has to pull back his index finger, hissing in pain. “Why didn’t you tell me?” His voice is trembling. Anger or grief or fear. She can’t tell. Maybe all of them.

“I _couldn’t!_ God, Tim, do you think I would have kept it from you unless I didn’t have a choice?”

“I’m—I’m serving some kind of _eldritch knowledge god_ and my best friend died a year ago and I didn’t even notice and somebody stole her, pretended to _be_ her—” 

“I am her. It’s—I’m Sasha.” The static tries to drown her out, and she repeats it again, louder. _“I’m Sasha.”_

“You—?”

“Yeah.” 

A weak laugh from over the tape recorder. 

“That’s, uh... that's why I couldn’t tell you my name.” 

“I still don’t…”

“It’s… it’s okay. If you don’t recognize me.” 

“I’m sorry. Sasha, I'm so—” 

“It’s okay. I’m still me.” 

xxxiii. She had thought Tim knowing would make things better for him. She had been wrong. 

Wherever he’s going, it doesn’t make a difference what she does to try and stop him. 

“Let me help. Please, Tim.” 

“You couldn’t. He’s not _like_ you, he isn’t—” 

“He’s not different from me at all. He’s—he’s scared, and he’s lonely, and he doesn’t understand what he’s becoming, and nobody can help him. He doesn’t want to be a monster. He’s trying so _hard_ not to be a monster.” 

“Ha. Well, it’s not working. He’s just like the rest of them. Hallways and archives and _fucking_ circuses—”

“They’re different and you know it. You—we’re going to take down the Circus. We all are.” 

“Yeah. I am.” 

“Tim. You… You _are_ going to come back, right?” 

“...” 

“Tim.” 

He hits stop and walks away. 

xxxiv. Another late night. Everyone’s gone home but Jon, who’s slumped over his desk, hovering somewhere between sleep and consciousness. His unburnt hand is pressed into his temple as he tries to prop up his head a few minutes longer, and the glasses he hardly needs anymore are digging lines into his skin. She’s been watching him plan, scouring old statements for any trace of the Circus or one of Gertrude’s old ritual schemes. Just like any other man searching holy texts for comfort. 

Finally, his head drops down and he barely manages to snap awake soon enough to keep himself from knocking his skull into the surface of his desk. Jon blinks down at the wood and raises his head back up slowly. 

“Are—’re you here to give a statement?” He coughs to clear his throat and shakes his head, struggling back toward wakefulness. “I’m afraid the Archives are closed. H-how did you even get in here?” He stares at her and blinks again, eyes narrowing. “What are you?” 

For a second, she’s frozen. Then, blessing of blessings, a tape recorder clicks on. 

He chuckles, wry and tired, and rubs at his forehead. “Well. Statement begins, I guess.” She sighs, the sound buzzing over the tape recorder.

“This isn’t a statement, Jon.” 

His eyes go wide. “Y-you—” 

“Wait, how did you even see me? I’ve been—” 

“I, uh—the Eye, I guess, it’s—how are you still here? You’ve been dead for, for—I still don’t know your face, but you’re—you have to be Sasha, right?” 

“Yeah. Recognized my voice, did you?” 

He crumples in on himself slightly. “Y-yes. I, uh, I only have the one tape, the one where you’re talking about the calliope, but—” 

“Cal-ee-OH-pee.” 

Jon laughs wetly and puts his face in his hands. “Fuck.” 

“I missed you, Jon.” 

“I missed you too.” He looks at her again for a long moment, face open and vulnerable. “Am I really the only one who can see you?” 

“Other than Elias? Yeah.” 

_“Oh._ Ugh.” 

“Mm. It’s not ideal, no.” 

He’s already calculating, she can see it on his face. Measuring up all his experiences in the past months against what he knows now, all the unexplained whispers of the tape recorder and strange moments where the omnipresent sense of being watched didn’t feel so malicious and flitting sights of a woman wandering through the shelves of the Archives. There’s the weary shadow of a smile on his face. 

Sasha really did miss him.

xxxv. She doesn’t stay still so much anymore. It’s hard to. Spends her nights and days pacing through halls that feel emptier and emptier every time she walks them. There’s no comfort in the action anymore. It feels the way breathing used to. 

Everybody’s staying later and later these days. Tim only shows up less and less, mostly using the tunnels where she can’t follow him. The blood-crazed woman who calls herself Daisy stares toward the corners where she stands like a dog pointing, and Sasha slips out of the rooms they share when she can. Martin bustles around trying to fix everything and she misses him fiercely, the way he used to smile when she invited him out for drinks, his shy excitement when he’d talk with her about knitting patterns. The thing who was not her didn’t knit. He probably doesn’t even remember she did anymore. Melanie sharpens herself into a knife. Jon keeps becoming what he will become. Basira plans their impossible mission. It’s hard to shake off the sense that they are all doomed. Each with their own tragedy.

xxxvi. Sometimes it’s easier not to talk. Sometimes it’s easier to pretend she was never there at all. 

Tim sits with the tape recorder in his wormscarred, shaking hands. 

“I was in love with you, you know. I feel like I can tell you that now that it doesn’t matter.” He waits for a response and gets none. “I still am. Isn’t that just the—?” He pulls in a shuddering breath and drags a hand down his face. “I mean, I don’t know what memories I have of you are real. I don’t even know what you look like anymore. I tried. God, I spent days searching my flat for just _one_ picture that hadn’t been changed, and I couldn’t—there was _nothing._ I asked Melanie a few months back too. She didn’t—you were tall. Maybe taller than me. I bet I liked that. Thought it was cute. You had long hair. You had glasses. Probably a huge nerd, huh?” He sighs. “Sometimes I think I imagined you. I don’t—I don’t know if that would make it easier or not.” 

The room is silent but for the sound of their breathing. 

“I love you too. For the record.” 

In the end, they both know it makes no difference. 

xxxvii. She isn’t sure why she hasn’t told the others she’s here yet. Martin or Basira or Melanie or even Daisy. 

Maybe it's just that the longer she spends not talking, the harder it is for her to remember she still can. 

xxxviii. It’s late at night and the Institute is so, so quiet. It’s familiar in a way that she can’t remember if she likes or not. Only Martin and Melanie and Elias are still here. She can hear Martin crying in Jon’s office. There are some things she has no desire to see. 

xxxix. “Um—Tim said to come in here and, uh, turn on a tape recorder? If—if things went wrong. He said I’d figure it out pretty quickly. So, uh, here goes, I guess.” 

“So things went wrong.” 

He yelps and drops the tape recorder with a clatter. “What—?”

“I’m Sasha. The real Sasha. What happened?” The old static tries to engulf the words again, drown them alive, but the name is hers again, not the Eye’s or the Stranger’s. _Yours,_ she reminds herself. _Yours._

“I-it all went wrong. Daisy’s probably dead though they haven’t found any remains, and J-Jon’s dead, and Tim—he—” 

“Oh.” 

“Yeah.” 

“Just us, then?” 

“I mean, um, Basira’s still here. Melanie too—”

“You know what I mean.” 

“Y-yeah.” 

xxxx. Sasha knew what an anchor is. Knew that the only thing that can keep you whole in this world is your connections to what remains in the other one. 

She knew what an anchor is, and she has come unmoored. But she _sees_ now. Understands. These halls are hers. These people, these books. These ancient records of fear, delicate and beautiful in their humanity. Wherever their story goes, there will be no survivors. 

The tape recorders start to sing again at night and in the day sometimes too. People jab at the button to stop the playback, and when that doesn’t work, they try the button to end the recording too. It doesn’t do much good. They try to forget about it. A tape recorder is just a tape recorder. It might be laughing, but the static is too loud for anybody to tell. There might be words. A voice, humming. It isn’t a song anybody can recognize anymore. It was never a song at all. 

The Magnus Institute holds too many ghost stories to count. 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading. you can find me on tumblr [@boneroutes](https://boneroutes.tumblr.com) if you'd like (it is sasha james hours 24/7 over there)!


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